Melinda Clark

I’m wealthy, powerful, and able to get any woman I want. So why do I feel so empty inside? In search of a deeper me, I take a sabbatical from my privileged life. One year of backpacking around Europe: a new identity, no contacts, and no money. Not a bad plan, I think. Until I get there. A crowded hostel room, body odor, and beer bongs—there are no words for the fresh hell I’ve landed in. But amid the chaos, I meet my new roommate, Hayden Whitmore. She sleeps in the bed opposite me, and I openly admit to staring at her more than I sleep.

The Hale family is obsessed with status, power, and control. No problem is too big their money can’t solve. Royce Hale manipulated me into giving him everything. My virginity. My hand in marriage. My heart. And as soon as he got what he wanted, he callously sold me off for a cool $10 million. In the boardroom and the twisted game his family plays, he says the only rule is to win at all costs. Yesterday I learned a painful lesson not to trust the prince of Cape Hill. Today I’ll destroy his carefully laid plans and show him just how badly he’s already lost.

She was supposed to save me. In a twist of fate, I rescued her. Since then, I've lived for her, breathed for her, overreached with my love. She's still here, so I must be doing something right. But now I want more. Except, a dangerous secret from my past threatens to come between us, forcing me to confront what kind of man I am. And whether I'm the one who can save our future. Or whether fate has other plans for us.

When a shipwreck surfaces, old secrets are sure to follow. Or so goes the lore in Ivy Neale’s hometown of Nags Head, North Carolina. When Ivy inherits her family’s beachfront cottage upon her grandmother’s death, she knows returning to Nags Head means facing the best friend and the boyfriend who betrayed her years ago. But then a winter gale uncovers the shipwreck of local legend—and Ivy soon begins to stumble across more skeletons in the closet than just her own.

When Rita McCall discovers her husband’s affair, there isn’t a lick of surprise—not a single tear or broken heart. Just a wife and mother who’s over it and ready to watch her twenty-three-year marriage go up in flames. Sticking close, thick as thieves since childhood, Rita’s unfailingly loyal cousins Jemel and Sharae become her lifeline. They stand beside her as she contemplates a new career and navigates the murky waters of being a preacher’s daughter disgraced by scandal.

The most important thing I’d ever read was scribbled on the door of a portable restroom, engraved into plastic at a carnival on the outskirts of Boston. Lust lingers, love stays. Lust is impatient, love waits. Lust burns, love warms. Lust destroys, but love? Love kills. Maybe it was always my destiny to fall in love with a monster. When other kids stayed awake at night fearing the pointy-toothed beast hiding in their closet, I longed to see mine.

I didn't mean to star in a sex tape, okay? It was just one of those unexplainable things. Like Stonehenge, Police Academy 2, and morning glory clouds. It just happened. Now, my ball-busting father is sentencing me to six months of celibacy, sobriety, and morbid boredom under the roof of Boston's nerdiest girl alive, Sailor Brennan. The virginal archer is supposed to babysit my ass while I learn to take my place in Royal Pipelines, my family's oil company. Little does she know, that's not the only pipe I'll be laying....

He was gorgeous, older and guarded. I knew he was trouble from the moment we locked eyes. We met at work, on my first day as a barista. He smiled, I melted...then he tasted my coffee and threw it away. Again, the next day, and the next. He hated the coffee, yet still came back. I knew his game. He called my coffee death in a cup. I called him god’s gift to women. I wasn’t lying.

After being left at the altar, I have sworn off men. Until the childhood friend I hero-worshipped steps into my clinic. Max is every bit the troublemaker I remember, only now he has a body to drool over and a smile to melt my panties. Can I give in to his demands without risking my heart?

He was passion and the reason I breathed. I loved him, trusted him when life taught me to trust no one. He was nothing I thought he was. He wasn’t even the man he said he was. He was dangerous. Everyone told me to hide, to run, but now he’s back. He came for me and I’m not running at all. Because he’s still the man that gave me a reason to breathe and if that’s dangerous, that’s a risk I will have to take.